


Glamour

by Anonymous



Category: Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/F, Poetry, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:52:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2824097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two alien girls are hounded by traders at the spaceport.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glamour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ijemanja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ijemanja/gifts).



> Much gratitude to MadameHardy for her eleventh hour aid with narrative and scansion.

  
Morning and evening, 

The spaceport rang with cries:

Human traders shouting:  
   
"Come try, come try,  
   
Candies and puddings,  
   
Gumdrops and lollies,

Fine savours and scents,

Marshmallows and mints,  
  
Bright liquors in thin chocolate crust,    
   
Sweet lemon pops to build up your lust,  
   
Cakes sprinkled with red cinnamon rust,  
   
Nuts glazed over with syrupy dust,  

Cocoa nibs and sorbitol thrust,  
   
Packed together,

In orbital tether,

Never melting,

Never dry,  
   
We do not dissemble, we never lie,  
   
There is no cost,  
   
Come try, come try."  
 

 

   
The spaceport hid itself as a dark outline against the starburst sky. Purple swirls of air-infused propulsion exhaust hung in misty spirals between the high towers of launch scaffolding. Fields of mirror-smooth solar panels stretched away in every direction. 

The panels were dark at night, coming to life occasionally, unexpectedly, when the lights of the ships in port or the lanterns of the human traders turned to just the right angle to strike a reflection, passing the gleam on to each neighbouring panel, and so on in a shimmering wave.

Past the solar farm lay the scrap yard. Broken cargo crates, twisted metal, and ruined drive engines lay in disordered heaps. The sign by the fence said that the trash would soon be recycled into a magnificent expansion, but the paper was weather-torn and sun-faded. The people of Settina tolerated the spaceport's trade, but wished it kept contained. They would not sell their land.

Two maids in the best blush of youth sorted through the trash for trinkets. They were not human, though distant legend said that their ancestors had come from Earth (fled from Earth, some said, but the reasons were always vague). They were long and thin women with wide eyes and blue-grey skin. The humans had many impolite names for their race – mutants, sirens, changeling freaks – most commonly, they were known as goblins.

(Humans being polite sometimes called them fae, but that was a rarity almost unknown.)

The maidens weaving their way between mounds of abandoned freight and shattered hull plates called one another sister.

As they made their way among the refuse, the maids causally changed their form, flitting at whim between fur, feather, scale, and shell. The same uninformed who called their people goblins decried this talent as foul glimmer, glamour, or gramarye.

The sisters, Lizzie and Laura, called it play.  
   
Though they both enjoyed the game of gathering, the sisters were opposite in most ways:

Laura was like a leaping flame: rash and ever questing. Her form shifted, rippled, with fur and quill, scale and shell, feather – even leaf. She flickered through unsettled colours: bright and opal, gold and brass, contrasts of purple and fresh spring grass.

Lizzie was more deliberate, placid in her bearing. Laura was a shifting blur while Lizzie remained her plain tall self. Only close inspection would reveal the jet black feathers hidden in her ebony hair.

A small detail, a tiny vanity, a hidden spontaneity which would glide beneath the glance of casual eyes.

Though their differences were vast, each admired the other's gifts. Laura bounced and slithered, flew and jabbered in a restless whirl, rarely finding trinkets, but always uncovering new places to search. Lizzie trailed slow behind, scanning the nooks Laura unveiled.

Together they found enough to sell at market and pay the rent for the humble den they kept together on the sward beyond the spaceport's gate.

   


 

Evening by evening 

Among the trash and toxin,  
   
Laura rifled ahead with cheer,

Lizzie trod with caution,

Working close together, 

Searching for their treasure,

With flapping wings and scuttling claws,

With scaly faces and fingers tips, 

They heard the trader's cry:

"Come try, come try."

Lizzie fluffed her feathers, shunned the sound,  
   
Her claws clutched tight the blasted ground. 

"I know," Laura said,

Winking in delight,  
   
"We must not look at human men,  
   
We must not try their treats:  
   
Who knows what broken dreams may fill,  
   
The greedy cargoes of their fleets?"  
   
"Come try," the crier waved,  
   
Hobbling twixt the cast-off crates,  
   
"Oh," cried Lizzie, "Laura, Laura,

You should not peep at human men.

You should not smell their sweets,"  
   
But Laura with her twitching nose,  
   
Held up her glossy head,

And whispered, “look:

Down the dock tramp trader men, 

One hauls a basket,

One bears a plate,

One lugs a golden dish

Oh, Lizzie, see the spiced pralines,  
   
Hazelnuts and candied kiwi,  
   
Wildflower honey flecked with comb,  
   
Lavender ices rich and –  
   
Oh! Lizzie! Look! Just see"  
   
"No," said Lizzie, "No, no, no;

Their offers should not charm us,

Their evil gifts would harm us."

New wings pushed against thin air, 

Lizzie flapped, shut eyes, and fled,

Curious Laura choose to linger,  
   
As the men ringed round to offer:  
   
Their oozing treats in silver cups and crackling bags,  
   
Nuts and fruit and thickened cream,  
   
Crystals of sugar and agave nectar,  
   
Chocolate poured and melted,  
   
"Come try! Come try!"  
   
Laura opened her mouth,  
   
Closed her eyes and swallowed doubt,  
   
While Lizzie from a distant perch,  
   
Screamed her rage at the ill-meant gift,  
   
At the cowardice of her for flying,  
   
At never doing more to save,  
   
Her sister from the human's trade.  
 

 

  
As soon as the men had crept away, Lizzie flew to her sister's side. Laura wore her natural maiden form: a young girl with wide blue eyes. She blinked at her sister’s approach and gave a sweet-toothed smile. 

"How could you?" Lizzie scolded.

Laura shrugged her rippling skin to gold, her stubbly eyelashes grew long and dark. Staring a sardonic monkey stare Laura asked, "Why not?"

Then shifted once more, languorously growing bat-like wings, before launching into the air to turn a joyous loop.

"Lizzie! You can't imagine what I tasted! Sweetness flowed between my lips, not cloying in my throat. Creamy on my tongue. Citrus, chocolate, vanilla mint – such flavours you can't imagine. It was so much better than any market fruit! A bit of shine against the dullness of our sad nocturnal lives. I am glad I tried. I will try again. Lizzie, if you weren't such a –  "

"They meant you harm!" Lizzie shouted, landing on the blackened earth. She melted back into her maiden form. "I've heard the stories, haven't you? Of what the humans do to errant girls?"

"You're jealous," Laura said, shifting back again to natural form. She looked thinner against the mist, her edges blurred.

Lizzie turned her back to her. Worried, but too ashamed to say that her sister's words were true.  
 

 

 

The moon slunk over the firmament,  
   
The mist sank into meadows calm.  
   
A distant grumble, a further flame,  
   
The dreaded human ship was gone.

The sisters crept home fleeing dawn,  
   
Neither speaking of Laura's shame,  
   
They curled up under sun-drenched rocks,  
   
And nuzzled together, fur and feather,  
   
Pretending that night had seen no wrong,  
   
But lies will always show their nature.  
   
Free sweets come with hidden fees,  
   
Secret costs and poisoned dreams.  
   
Next moon saw Laura wasting wane,  
   
Trembling in a young girl's skin,  
   
No glimpse left of goblin glamour,  
   
Begging in an addict's stammer:  
   
"Lizzie, hear you motors ringing? Humans singing?  
   
Is that far-off smoke a landing? Or just the tortured ground expanding?  
   
Or is the fire lit from my longing ?  
   
Lizzie, Lizzie, this lava in my veins, this needing,  
   
Lizzie, Lizzie, it hurts,"  
 

 

  
Days and evenings passed, while Lizzie grew ever weaker. She ceased her jests and gallivants. Though Lizzie wanted only to protect her, she knew that on her own she couldn't find enough trinkets to pay the rent. 

Warily, they approached the scrap yard together, and slipped beneath the wire boundary. For a time Laura seemed almost normal, climbing, dancing, and diving over the mountains of trash. She flickered before forms, not as quickly as before, but fast enough that Lizzie had hope in her heart as she followed. Maybe the human threat had fled?

Then she heard a sound filled her with livid rage and queasy dread:

"Come try! Come try!"

Lizzie hated the trader men, the raider men, who gave their dangerous treats. Who held their coins and smiled, knowing full well the effect their candies had on goblin children. She watched Laura clambering, panting, slowing, needy panic in her eyes.

"You hear them," Laura accused. "Make them sell me what I need."

Why did they do it? Lizzie wondered. Did the humans hate them? Was it revenge or only greed?

She remember a friend from years past: A girl named Jeanie who'd lived beside them on the grass.

Jeanie had been quick and clever. She'd favoured flowers for her morphs, and would dance with vine-twined arms and petal hair. A human trader had approached one day, and no one had told Jeanie not to taste the treats he peddled forth.

Jeanie died a short time later. Her limbs wasted and flowers withered. Then the men had seized her patch of prairie, built their fence and filled it with burning things and flashing panels, glass and metal, waste and rubble.

Nothing grew on the spaceport's land.

Laura perched on a blackened cinder pile. "Why can you hear them and I can't?" she asked, nearly sobbing.

Lizzie remembered how Jeanie had deafened in her last days. Lost her senses, and then, like a banished spirit, faded.

"Come home," Lizzie said, carefully mouthing the words. Laura slowly came down from her roost. But it was still hard for Lizzie to drag her away, tugging against the cries of "come try," that strained the bonds of sisterhood.

Returning to their dirt-walled dwelling took a fearful time, and Lizzie's chest seized each time her sister stumbled. On reaching safety, Lizzie tenderly put Laura to bed. Then with heavy heart she went to market and bought good goblin fruits: apples and gooseberries, cherries mulberries, plump peaches with skin like velvet – as much as she could carry. Lizzie spent the last of their spaceport baubles and returned laden.

She came home to find Laura licking furiously at the silver wrapper of a human treat. The mournful look in Laura's eye killed the blazing shout Lizzie meant to give: _How could you_.

"I know," Laura said, and looked away, ashamed.

Lizzie held out her feast, and Laura's body limpened. It was as if the sight of true, nourishing food drained from her what strength she still retained. Seeing the goodness she'd lost was more painful than the poison in her veins.

"Try, Laura, please try," Lizzie begged, pushing the delicacies against her sister's mouth, but not a morsel passed. In desperation she forced a thin tube between the chapped lips and dribbled in sparkling water from a holy spring. The Settina man at market had claimed it a healing draught as he grabbed Lizzie's last money in his wine-stained claw.

Perhaps it was holy. Perhaps it was not.

But it did not help.

A few nights past rent, a red-lettered eviction notice found its way onto the rocks above their den. Lizzie ignored it.

Evening by evening, Laura lessened, from translucent to transparent to barely a form in the air, an imagining held in place only by Lizzie's firm refusal to let her sister go.  
   
 

  
Death lingered, loitered on their door, 

Laura faded towards that other shore,  
   
Was any taste worth such a price?  
   
Some might have said that Laura cast her dice,  
   
Well earned her fate.  
   
Cool and clammy,  
   
Still as stone,  
   
Diminishing into dirt,

Lizzie ignored that rumour, but  
   
The nagging thought would never leave,  
   
And Lizzie tore her clothes to grieve,  
   
The fading vapour of her sister,

Night by night, both eve and evening,  
   
The wind blew in the human's chortling:  
   
"Come try, come try!"

The treats for which so much had been lost,

The cure with such a fearful cost 

Lizzie made her choice,

On cold dusk at fall's first frost.  
   
She kissed her sister's sallow cheek,  
    
"Give me courage now," she sighed.  
   
Laura gave her no reply.

Lizzie pried the wrapper from her hand,

Placed it in her satchel,  
   
Set out from their small den,  
   
Crossed frozen veldt and plot,  
   
Faced the spaceport's shin and sin,  
   
Crept closely, till she caught,  
   
The customary cry:  
   
"Come try, come try,"  
   
With its iterated jingle,  
   
Of sugar-baited lie.

And Lizzie creeping small but certain,

Whispered with a nervous lisping:

"I would like to try."

 

 

Hesitantly, Lizzie approached a group of three traders seated on a pile of newly unloaded crates. They stopped chatting amongst themselves and turned to look at her.

A thin man with a chalky face and waxen hair rose to greet her first. "Hullo there, goblin girl. What do you want? We have gum and gobstoppers, cookies and custards, candied gingers and sugar clumps. Take your pick."

With shaking fingers, Lizzie pulled the wrinkled wrapper from her satchel, and tossed the shining fragment on the rocket-burned dirt.

"More of that which this wrapped," she said in a quaver, and then, thinking of Laura, found more strength. She stood tall and straight, looking into the human's eyes as their equal, not their prey, and said:

"Give me much and many."

The men smiled, not nice smiles, and started exchanging sly whispers, speaking just loud enough for Lizzie to hear. She knew they did it to scare her:

"I've heard that goblin pelts are going dear on Kervast," said a balding trader with bulging, decompression-veined eyes.

"Their beady eyes fetch a better price than that on Sing," crackled the communication radio of the third trader. He wore full space garb, atmospheric seal in place.

Even though she was afraid, the trader's refusal to lift his helmet visor gave Lizzie some confidence. They were afraid of her and her planet. Afraid of breathing the goblin air.

"I know at least one rich lady back on Terra who keeps the things as pets," said the waxen-haired man. "She has a whole menagerie of them, trained to change to whatever shape delights her fancy."

He paused for a moment, then turned from his fellows to ask Lizzie:

"What is it you were meaning to pay us with? It's well known around here that all you and your sister have you've stolen from us, and even of that, you've got none left." He pulled a folded document from his breast pocket and tapped it against Lizzie's upturned chin. "And, says here, that you haven't been paying your rent."

"I could give you everything I find today. Everything I find tomorrow. Everything I find this fortnight," Lizzie offered.

The men laughed so she offered more. Then more. Then more: her life, her body, her soul ---

What was she worth, if she could not bring Laura succour?

 Still the men laughed at her. They opened their crates pushed their contents towards her. Their toffees, their truffles, their Turkish Delights.

 "Come on," said the waxen-haired man, "We know how poor you are kid, and you look half-starved. Ribby, frail. Eat, and then we'll barter. Try. Share."

 "Thank you, but no," Lizzie said, without lowering her gaze. "One waits at home alone for me, and I don't want to waste her moments talking here. Sell me what you have, much and many, or I will withdraw."

 The men snarled and leapt at her. Lizzie fought the urge to flee, to perch upon a distant tree. She stood with her feet in rubble and her head in mist. She stood despite the storm. Despite the shouted insults in her ear. The men told her she was less than human (high praise, she thought). Shouted: "Mutant", "Bitch", and "Freak."  
 

  
   
They trod and hustled her,  
   
Elbowed and jostled her,  
   
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,  
   
Twitched her hair out by the roots,  
   
Stamped upon her tender feet,  
   
Held her hands and pressed their treats,  
   
Against her mouth to make her eat,  
   
Smeared her face with caramel sugar,  
   
Hissing hot to leave its mark,  
   
Pelted her with rocks of candy,  
   
Licorice lashes raised thin welts,  
   
Whatever tortures Lizzie felt,  
   
She stood firm,  
   
As raven fronts a storm,  
   
Like a beacon left alone,  
   
Shining light against the flood,  
   
She would not be moved,  
   
Though the men cuffed and caught her,  
   
Coaxed and fought her,  
   
Bullied and besought her,  
   
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,  
   
Kicked and knocked her,  
   
Mauled and mocked her,  
   
Slimed their syrups across her brow,  
   
Lizzie would not open her lips to drink.  
 

 

  
Eventually the men gave up and left to bother a different victim. Lizzie rose up from the dust. Her longing was to fly for home, but by changing form she knew that she might lose some of the precious sugars which stained her.

Lizzie walked away from the spaceport, clutching the legal notice the man had left her in one hand. Not counting time, she didn't notice morning passing into scorching day. Her clothes steamed against her. The sun dried sticky sugar film tight against her skin. Lizzie itched and longed to wash the human grime away, but knew that it had to stay. She reached the rocks which covered their dreary home, and remembered happier days, when Laura would have greeted her with song.

She crawled in to her sister's side. She thrust two fingers in Laura's unconscious mouth. And prayed.

Moments passed that last eons. Laura curled her fingers and stroked her sister's hair. Dropped tears against the sheets. And then –

The tingle, the ache, the joy of it: the moment Laura began to suckle.

"Yes! Go on!" Lizzie wept. "Lick me, drink me, drain me dry."

Moment by moment Laura became more solid, a ghost returning to life. She sucked with vigour from finger to finger, and when those were clean, Lizzie gave her face, her lips, her breasts.

"How could you?" Lizzie asked when her voice returned, tracing the contours of her sister's hurts.

"Why not?" came the careless reply, tear in eye. "Never mind my bruises. Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices."

"But won't you now become like me?"

Lizzie plucked a feather from her own hair and let it fall between them. Time flowed like glass as the feather fell to the sheets. A solid piece. It did not fade away.

"Truthfully, I don't know, Laura. I stood before the traders with my mouth closed. I didn't taste that which they offered, but perhaps they can poison us in different ways? The stories never favour goblin children, but you were lying there near broken. What else was I supposed to do? I did smell that tempting tang, and I understand the risk you took. I wanted to try it too."

"So touch me now, and sate your sugar lust," said Laura, pulling close.

The sisters kissed and kissed and kissed again. They embraced as the kindly moon rose. Sweet fire rushed through their blood. They twined together skin on skin and lips on throat. Another evening the humans might return. Another evening when their cry came Lizzie and Laura both might yearn. If Lizzie had misjudged they would both fade to dust. Or maybe they would fight back against the threats that came, standing strong on the love they claimed.

Later the sisters strode hand in hand across the plain, their way lit by rocket flame, away from a home soon to be ransacked and burned, knowing that whatever happened next:

They faced it together.

 


End file.
